Page 17 of The Infinite Glade
He should have spat on his stiff body.
But instead, he leaned over and shut the man’s eyelids, hoping the birds wouldn’t peck them out. Then he hurried back to theMaze Cutterwith an old war chant rising up in his mind:
Kill the Godhead.
Kill the Godhead.
Kill the Godhead.
What’s done is done, but Cian and Erros stared at Ximena with disbelief.
“It’s the truth. Annie Kletter’s dead.” She said it again in case the brothers didn’t hear her over the crackling of the flour cake in the fire. It felt good to say it out loud.Annie Kletter is dead.Murdered. El Día de los Muertos, the holiday for celebrating the dead, used to be Ximena’s favorite time of year—but not anymore. Not with her mother gone to the afterlife. If she ever did make it back to her Village, she promised herself that she’dnevertell the Villagers Annie Kletter died. Absent-minded Annie didn’t deserve to be celebrated. Or mourned. Or ever spoken about again.
“Kletter’s dead?” Erros hung his head. “Red Seas and Remnants of Russia, I didn’t think Annie Klettercoulddie.”
“Of course she can die . . .” Cian stood up and started pacing fireside. “Now we’re all dead!” He threw up his hands. Ximena held her annoyance at bay by biting the inside of her cheek.
“I just mean, of all the people, she . . . she . . .” Erros stumbled over his words until Cian gave him an accusatory look.
“Dead is dead,” Old Man Frypan chimed in.
Ximena couldn’t bite her cheek any longer. No amount of pain could hold back the truth. “Annie Kletter wasn’t a hero . . .” she said to Erros unapologetically. “And she shouldn’t be mourned. She deserved everything that happened to her.”
Erros squinted at Ximena. “How could you say that?”
She had more than one reason to hate Annie Kletter, but she said the one thing that hurt her the most. “Because she killed my mom. Point-blank with a gun. Do you know what kind of worthless human being you have to be to do that to someone?”
Erros looked at her as if she were holding a gun to his head right then, but she only had the knife. Kletter’s stupid knife. Cian stopped pacing and looked at Ximena the same way everyone did when they thought they recognized her mother’s features in her own face. Confusion. Acceptance. Sadness.
“What? You don’t believe me?” She grew more annoyed with every single second she spent around this fireside chat that she never wanted to be a part of in the first place.
“Your mother . . . ?” Erros asked as if there was more to say.
“Erros, don’t.” Cian walked to put his arm in front of his brother. “Just don’t.”
Did he want proof Kletter wasn’t a good person? Ximena was happy to oblige. “Annie Kletter lied every chance she got. She turned my ancestors’ Village into a cemetery, and I’m not going to sit here while you memorialize her and . . . and . . .” She didn’t know what else to say. She just needed to leave.
“Ximena, wait.” Isaac reached for her arm, but their reaction about Annie Kletter was a sign to move on. These weren’t her people. She’d rather travel alone in the darkness than sit with anyone who idolized that ruthless woman.
“Ximena, maybe—” Isaac tried to fix things as if Kletter’s existence could be undone.
“No.” Ximena shrugged him off. “It’s the truth. Annie Kletterdeservedto die.” She said it with righteous anger.
Old Man Frypan nodded and whispered. “Let her go, Isaac . . .”
“Do . . . you want to knowhowshe died?” Jackie asked Cian, surprising everyone.
What a stupid question, thought Ximena. As ifhowKletter died made her a victim and by being a victim she’d be somehow innocent from everything else she’d done to hurt others. That woman was a monster. A murderer. A thief of futures.
Jackie continued. “She died after we were waiting beside this house, and these two?—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Erros said abruptly. “We’ll never find it now. The whole thing. Done. Gone.” His words went from anxious to erratic. “Going to be long forgotten.” He threw his hands up at his brother, a common gesture of these guys.
Ximena glared from just outside the light of the fire. They seemed to care about something else even more than Kletter, but Annie wasn’t that important.
“Relax,” Cian said. “We’ll figure it out.”
“How are we going tofigure it out?” Erros snapped a fish bone in half and threw it into the fire. “All the trials, everything—for it to end likethis?”
